Monday, April 20, 2015

The Nursing Home Explorer: Spatial Visualization of Nursing Home Compare

Consumers who are considering placing a loved one in a nursing home have important questions about nursing home safety and quality. Fortunately, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have created Nursing Home Compare, which is an online database that contains quality data for all nursing homes certified under Medicare and Medicaid. Nursing Home Compare provides a star-ratings system of nursing home characteristics such as health inspections, staffing, quality measures, and overall quality. Consumers can use Nursing Home Compare to make a side-by-side comparison of the star ratings for up to three different nursing homes.



Map view showing star-ratings for nursing homes in northern Kentucky (filtered by state), and rollover windows for nursing home address and nursing home characteristics star-ratings

HealthLandscape created the Nursing Home Explorer to provide a user-friendly spatial visualization tool for Nursing Home Compare data for nursing homes in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Each nursing home is displayed as a red, yellow, or green point on the map based on its overall quality star-rating, allowing users to quickly compare the quality of neighboring nursing homes. When a user moves their mouse over a point, the nursing home name, address, and the star-ratings for the nursing home’s staffing, health inspections, quality measures, and overall ratings are displayed in windows on the screen. Users are able to filter the selection of nursing homes displayed on the map by ownership, provider type, or state, and have the option to view the data displayed on the map in a table format. In the Stats tab, users can examine the correlation between nursing home characteristics and community demographic and health data for the county in which the nursing home is located. The Nursing Home Explorer is a very useful tool for quickly comparing multiple nursing homes in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, and provides an important spatial visualization component for Nursing Home Compare data. 

Stats view showing correlation between overall star-ratings for nursing homes and percent Age 65 & older below 100% of federal poverty level at the county level (for the county in which the nursing home is located) in Kentucky

To access the Nursing Home Compare Explorer, see http://www.healthlandscape.org/NursingHomeExplorer/map.cfm 


Want to Learn More?


Learn more about HealthLandscape with our online Webinars and Training
In-depth instruction on using HealthLandscape tools and additions to our ever-growing data library



For more information about Nursing Home Compare, see http://www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare/About/What-Is-NHC.html


No comments:

Post a Comment